Bringing Social Gospel Back

Today's post comes to us from Paul Putz, a PhD student at Baylor University. (You can find him on Twitter by tweeting @p_emory or on academia.edu through his page here.)  Paul's post is part of a series of posts at Religion in the American West. We're inviting scholars to write about their research as it intersects with or is shaped by religion in the American West. For more details or to suggest a post, please contact us at: relamwest[at]gmail[dot]com. 

by Paul Putz

The social gospel is back. It never really went away of course, but the notoriously nebulous historical subject is set to be prominent once again in scholarly discussion of American religious history. One reason for this is Heath Carter, a professor at Valparaiso who has a book under contract with Oxford that argues for a “social Christianity” from below, a working-class gospel that developed in Chicago (and other industrial cities) in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and influenced what later became known as the social gospel.

But Carter is not the only one thinking about the subject. At the American Society of Church History’s spring 2014 meeting, Ralph E. Luker, Amanda Porterfield, Wendy Deichmann, Chris Evans, and Rima Lunin Schultz joined Carter to discuss the social gospel; their comments will be published in a forthcoming issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. Others, including Janine Giordano Drake, also have projects related to the topic currently underway.

Reading Carter’s work on the social gospel has caused me to consider how a view from the American West would change our understanding of the social gospel. At the Religion in American History blog, I recently discussed the intersection of the social gospel with the American West, including ground that has already been trod and five possible themes (three of which were inspired by Ferenc Morton Szacz’s work) for future research:

1) Continuity between the social gospel and the clergy’s role in helping to develop postbellum western “instant cities.”

2) Multiculturalism, or moving beyond the black/white racial binary.  Joshua Paddison’s American Heathens, although not about the social gospel, is an excellent example of how a western setting changes how we view race and religion.

3) Ecumenical social work. Did the diverse religious landscape in the West help to foster a more ecumenical spirit?

4) The West was more conducive to women's suffrage than any other region in the U.S. Perhaps the increased political freedom afforded to women in the West shaped the forms that the social gospel took, or led to increased female leadership in social gospel activity.

5) Populism. It was, after all, a former Populist from Nebraska named George Howard Gibson who helped to popularize the term “social gospel” in the first place.

Of course, as a religious “movement” (if we can give it that much coherence), the social gospel has generally been closely associated with the urban Northeast – this despite the fact that early leaders like George Herron and Charles Sheldon operated in the Midwest. But its current historiographical northeastern orientation makes an American West lens all the more important. Work by scholars like Darren Dochuk (From Bible Belt to Sunbelt) and Matthew Avery Sutton (Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America) are good examples of the usefulness of looking at a well-known religious subject from a western setting. Both challenged the dominant grand narrative of American evangelicalism, which for years depicted conservative evangelicals (or fundamentalists) retreating to the cultural margins in the time in between the Scopes Trial and World War II. Using California as a primary setting in their stories, Sutton and Dochuk demonstrated in their own ways that 1930s conservative evangelicalism was much more vibrant than historians focused on the East have imagined.  

There are challenges with any attempt to view the emergence of the social gospel from an American West perspective, not least of which is the problem of defining the very terms “social gospel” and “American West.” But even though a homogenous American West social gospel surely did not exist, the multiple regions and cultures that make up the West can provide new questions and new answers to our understanding of the early twentieth century social gospel. I know of at least one other person who would agree with me (and she’s kind of a big deal at this blog).

On a related and self-interested note, if you are currently working on a project dealing with the social gospel, or if you know of anyone who is, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at paul [underscore] putz [at] baylor [dot] edu.

OAH 2012 in Milwaukee: lots of labor history, not so much on religion or the West

by Tisa Wenger, April 27, 2012

I don’t always make it to the OAH (Organization of American Historians), but this year I’d been asked to respond to a panel titled “In the Aftermath of Contact with ‘Others’: The Reformulation of Religious and Racial Identity on the Frontier”—with three papers very much of interest to readers of this blog—so I made my way to Milwaukee for the conference last weekend. Actually I headed to Madison first, where I fit in four days of research at the fantastic Wisconsin Historical Society.  (They have impressive holdings that go far beyond Wisconsin history, so check it out if you ever have the chance. I spent most of my time there immersed in the papers of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union, and related collections.)

At the conference I roomed with an old friend, Colleen O’Neill, author of an excellent book on Navajo labor history, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. I bring this up because Colleen also happens to be the associate editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, based at Utah State University, and she mentioned to me that the WHQ is always interested in articles on religion in the American west. So if any of you are working on essays that might fit in that venue, send them her way!

To some extent the OAH program reflected the interests of this year’s president, Alice Kessler-Harris, who is a leading labor historian and gave a very interesting presidential address titled “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief.” So there were a few more sessions than usual related to labor and economic history, important topics to be sure, but not really speaking to my interests. And there were correspondingly few either on the American West or in religious history, let alone the two in combination. I noticed one panel on the Joseph Smith papers, but that happened while I was still in Madison. Another session, “Catholic Lay Women and Mid-Century Public Life,” included 1) Mary Henold on Catholic lay women’s responses to Vatican II, raising important questions about methods and sources for studying the “average” lay women, 2) Karen Johnson on Catholic women and interracial activism in mid-century Chicago, and 3) Tim Lacy on the relationship between political position and conversion to Catholicism in the life of Clare Booth Luce. Great stuff, but unless we place Chicago in the West, not really within the scope of this blog.

These exclusions, of course, reflect something of the blind spots of all these fields: mirroring the traditional lack of attention to class, labor, or the West among historians of American religion, labor historians have only relatively recently started to work on the west, and only a handful have found religious history relevant to their concerns. Exceptions to these lines of division on the program included a roundtable panel on “Religion, Corporate Capitalism, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century,” featuring the star-studded lineup of Kate Bowler, Darren Dochuk, Darren Grem, Kathryn Lofton, and Bethany Moreton, and another roundtable on “Religion, Democracy, and the Working Class in Capitalist America, Gilded Age to the Present.” I couldn’t attend either of these panels—one was on Thursday while I was still in Madison, and the other was on Sunday when I was already on my way back home—but they bode well for the developing conversation between religious history and the histories of class and labor.

Finally, back to the session that took me to the conference in the first place, which proved a fruitful exploration of the construction of racial and religious identities within various sites of encounter in the American west. Kristine Gunnell’s paper, “The Daughters of Charity as Cultural Intermediaries,” examined the motivations and racial dynamics of the work of this Catholic order in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, a time of extensive Mexican immigration into Southern California. In “Texas Jews and other Others: Race, Masculinity, and American Identity,” Sarah Imhoff interrogated the interest among some Jews in early twentieth-century Texas in claiming kinship to Native Americans, or somewhat later in “playing Mexican,” as ways of asserting both whiteness and masculinity. For Imhoff these practices reflected an impulse distinct from but parallel to the contemporaneous Zionist movement—one that similarly sought to assert Jewish identity and masculinity, but in this case placing themselves at home in the American West. And finally, in “William McCrary’s Racial Ventriloquism during the Mormon Exodus, 1846-1847,” Max Mueller mined the few available sources in an effort to recover the perspective of McCrary, a racially ambiguous “Negro-Indian” Mormon convert who left the Saints after Mormon leaders refused to accept his claims to prophetic authority. I am looking forward to seeing all three of these pieces in publication.

So that was my experience of the OAH this year. The take-home for me, as it has been so many times before, was—why so little in our field on the program? And one answer to that question is that if we want to see sessions on religion in the American west, then we need to propose them. Kudos to Kristine, Sarah, and Max for doing just that at this year’s conference, and I’d encourage all of you to do the same in future years!